Amazon will stream 4K video to UK from October

4K televisions have been doing the rounds at various technology shows for well over a year now, but there is still a massive dearth of content available in 4K resolution. This means that while the concept of owning a telly with an eye-poppingly high resolution is an attractive one, the TVs themselves don't really offer much value to consumers just yet.

Samsung has announced today, however, that it is going to help promote consumer adoption of the fancy television sets working with global content partners including Amazon and Netflix, to fast-forward the availability of 4K content. 4K equates to four times the resolution of Full HD, and is also called Ultra HD (UHD for short).

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Amazon announced earlier this year that it would be shooting and streaming its own original content in 4K, but gave no idea of when we could expect to actually get access to the content. Thanks to Samsung, we now know that we should be looking forward to is October. This is when Amazon's UHD video on demand service will roll out globally and Netflix's equivalent will also become available in Europe, after launching in the US with season two of

House of Cards earlier this year.

Samsung isn't the only TV manufacturer to have struck up a relationship with Netflix. The CEO of the streaming service was all over the show -- literally -- at CES in January this year. Netflix is highly unlikely to sign an exclusive content deal with one hardware manufacturer, but we can nevertheless expect to see Samsung and its rival attempt to offer more and more exclusive content options to lure customers into their 4K folds. "The era of UHD has begun, and to continue even more widespread adoption, it is important to provide consumers with more choices when it comes to UHD content," said Won Jin Lee, Executive Vice President of Visual Display Business at Samsung Electronics. He is perfectly right -- UHD is the future and its growth inevitable. But with nothing worth watching in such incredible detail on 4K tellies, they will remain a hard-sell to customers.

Despite this, according to NPD DisplaySearch, more 4K TVs were shipped in the three months that made up the second quarter of 2014 than in the whole of 2013. There could be several reasons for this -- first and foremost of which is that more manufacturers had brought more 4K TVs to market.

NPD DisplaySearch also notes that: "TV brands were largely marketing the higher pixel count to consumers". This suggests that retailers may well have marketed based on what 4K televisions are ultimately capable of, perhaps glossing over the fact that this relies on enough 4K content being available. It's also important to note that shipped refers to the number of TVs sent out to retailers, not the number actually sold to consumers.